Pages

Wednesday, 22 July 2015

A Doomed Love Affair

I’ve never read any Elizabeth Bowen before,
and I didn’t quite know what to expect from The House in Paris, with its
themes of love, sex, betrayal, growing up and the search for identity. To be
honest, after reading it I’m still not totally sure how I feel about it. It’s
one of those books that left me a bit cold really, because somehow I didn’t
quite connect with it or relate to any of the characters. I didn’t hate it, but I certainly didn’t love
it. It was an ‘almost’ book that I almost liked, but not quite. Even so, I can
appreciate the quality of the writing, the restraint and subtlety, the
observations of those quiet moments which seem so understated you almost miss them,
but you know they’re pivotal, that something has shifted, and things will never
be the same again. It’s kind of oblique - nothing is ever spelled out, motives
are never clear, and even the ending is ambiguous.

A 1976 Penguin edition of The /house in Paris.

In the first section two children are spending the
day in a house in Paris. Henrietta, aged 11, is between trains, en route from
London to her grandmother in the south of France. Leopold, two years younger,
living in Italy with his adoptive American family, is awaiting the mother he
has never met… but she never arrives. They are in the charge of Miss Naomi
Fisher, half English and half French, dominated by her bedridden mother.

Then we move back in time and the tragic events of
the past slowly unfold as the tensions builds. The Fishers once ran a small
‘finishing’ establishment for wealthy American and English girls, including
Karen Michaelis, who became friendly with Naomi. The two meet again when Naomi travels
to England with her fiancé Max, a charming young man who has a very odd relationship
with her mother. In Paris Karen disliked and feared him. Now she is besotted
with him, and he with her. They see each other twice more – once when Karen
goes to Boulogne for a meal with him, and again when they spend a night
together in England. When Karen discovers
her pregnancy she turns to Naomi for help so the birth can be kept secret, and
her son handed to others who will care for him. Afterwards she marries Ray, the
man she was originally engaged to.

Finally, we’re back in the present, when Ray
arrives in place of his fragile wife (and without her knowledge) and provides some
kind of resolution for poor, lonely Leopold.

All the characters seem lonely and disconnected,
searching for a love that they never find,

Author Elizabeth Bowen.

trying to establish their own
identity in a world they cannot understand. Adults and children alike are cruel
to each other, with words rather than deeds. Even the Parisian house feels
suffocating, ill at ease with the people who live in it and the city around it.

That feeling, I think, emanates from Madame Fisher,
as clever, manipulative and malicious as ever she was. It is she who tells Max
that Karen loves him, precipitating the action that follows. Was it a ploy to
prise Naomi and Max apart, to keep him in her power, knowing that despite their
passionate natures any permanent relationship between Max and Karen is
impossible? But even she can’t have predicted the outcome of the doomed affair
and the way Max reacts to the pressures on him.

Karen is hard to read. Is she ashamed of her
behaviour all those years ago? Does she regret giving her child away? Whatever
she felt then, she is unable to acknowledge Leopold now. Her reaction to her pregnancy
has to be seen in the context of the time. The book must have seemed shocking
when it was published in 1935, portraying a woman who pursued her sexual
desires and had a child out of wedlock.

Only Henrietta has no connection with the past. She
is an onlooker, there because her grandmother is acquainted with Naomi, and knows
nothing of the tragedy (which left me feeling emotionally drained). Nevertheless,
the day’s events leave their mark on her.

Today was to do much to disintegrate Henrietta’s character, which, built
up by herself, for herself, out of admonitions and axioms, (under the growing
stress of: If I am Henrietta, then what is Henrietta?) was a mosaic of all
possible kinds of prejudice.

Leopold is intelligent, spoilt, self-centred, misunderstood,
but he is not unloved – he is loved too much, by the wrong people, and yearns
for his real mother. There’s a chance of him growing up well and happy if he
sticks with Ray. And I know other reviewers believe Karen will join her son and
her husband, but that wasn’t my interpretation.

12 comments:

Not exactly baffling Mae, but somehow Bowen's writing made me feel distanced, or disassociated, from the characters and the action. I must admit that however the good the writing I much prefer a novel where I feel more involved.

I think the thing about Bowen is that she's one of those writers who maintains a distance from her characters, a "cool" writer, like Elizabeth Taylor, and that can put people off - I know lots of people who just don't find this a happy style to read, although I'm OK with it myself. So it's probably that.

I knew she distanced herself from her characters, and I knew there are similarities between her and Elizabeth Taylor, whose work I really love, so I hoped I would like Elizabeth Bowen. But I didn't connect with this at all.